Ask a teacher if touch is important in cognitive development and she’ll tell you yes, absolutely. There’s a whole discipline called kinesthetic learning devoted to teaching in a hands-on way, but you could have guessed this even without knowing the fancy title. Is a kid going to learn teamwork better from playing a sport or getting a lecture on the subject? Do you want the doctor who practiced surgery on a flesh-and-blood human body or the one who just read about it in a text book?
Touch is critical in human emotional development, as well. A Google search will turn up all kinds of long-term research that reinforces this idea in both humans and animals: one interesting study looked at orphaned Eastern Europeans who grew up in bleak institutions and exhibited signs of impaired growth and brain function as adults; another showed that physical interactions promoted growth and increased adult responsiveness in microscopic roundworms.
So touch is good. We can’t learn, or live, or love well without it. And I’m making these points in the hopes that nature writers will remember this when they get the urge to tell readers not to touch the merchandise.
Over the last few months, through stories I’ve read, I’ve been told not to pick and eat mushrooms if I’m not an expert, not to touch owl pellets with my bare hands, not to disturb snakes who are shedding their skins, not to go into swampy areas for fear of disturbing black bears, not to follow animal tracks for fear of bothering the animals – and these examples are just off the top of my head. These admonitions all contain a kernel of sense and they’re meant well, I know. The problem is that there’s a cumulative effect, especially in the context of our stay on the path, make no open fires, camp only in designated areas, NO HUNTING, FISHING, OR TRAPPING, the lake closes at dusk society, and it all starts to grind on a person after a while. It’s great to worry about human health and animal privacy – I admire that sensitivity – but the dark side of all this is that it alienates people from nature. Makes it seem dangerous and foreign; perpetuates the idea that we’re unwelcomed house guests trampling on Eden. None of this is conducive to learning or falling in love.
I’m certainly not the first person to bemoan all this. The writer Richard Louv has published several books along these lines in the last decade, and I remember a lengthy piece in Orion magazine on the subject just a few years back. But I haven’t heard much about it lately, and if the environmental essays in my inbox are any indication, it’s still a tic among nature writers. (Interestingly, one of the issues that is getting a lot of buzz these days is how our educational system may be leaving boys behind, which is sort of the same issue. As someone who learned to love nature by being mostly feral as a kid, I’m very receptive to the idea that domesticating a child, especially a boy, in the name of environmental correctness can be damaging to both the kid and the cause.)
I’m not advocating anything goes libertarianism, just a bit more faith in readers’ common sense, and a bit less sensitivity to humans in the landscape. If you’re a nature writer, consider if you really need to tell a reader not to do this or that. If the goal is to inspire a love of nature, we ought to be telling people to keep on the grass. Look, but don’t just look – touch, and taste, and smell too. Participate.
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